Here’s the good news. You can use just about any IDE to create firmware for PSoC 6 devices. How easy or hard it will be may vary, but the choice is yours. Read Software Development Models for PSoC 6 to learn more. I discuss PSoC Creator relative to PSoC 6 and the Peripheral Driver Library (PDL) in that article. The PDL is designed to be used with any IDE.

Let me group third-party IDEs into two categories: those that are “supported” and those that aren’t. You can use any IDE effectively, even "unsupported" IDEs.

Supported IDEs

The list of supported IDEs is subject to change, but as I write this the plans include:

IAR Embedded Workbench

Keil µVision

Atollic TrueStudio

iSystem WinIDEA

Command-line tools (make file)

For a supported IDE, you get some extra goodies to make life easier. These include

A template project for each core

Project build settings set for the particular device

IDE-specific files like startup code, linker files, or a flash loader

A defined export/import process for generated files

The export/import process varies significantly per IDE, so once you get the PSoC 6 platform you’ll want to read the PSoC Creator help files on how to import the code. You are not required to use the export/import process, you can always just add files from the Generated_Sources folder to your IDE’s project file. And that takes us to the "other" IDEs.

Other IDEs

So what if your preferred IDE isn’t on the “supported” list? Well, there is no formal export/import process. You manually add the PSoC Creator generated files to your IDE's project. You don’t have a template project, so you have to set up your own project completely. But it's your IDE, and you're familiar with what options are required and how to set them. You may need to develop some IDE-specific code, like a linker command file. However, you can examine those provided with the PDL to see how it’s done.

In all cases, whether it is a “supported” IDE or not, you can use PSoC Creator generated code if you want, or develop entirely without PSoC Creator. PSoC 6 Components and PDL Driverstalks a little bit about the trade-offs. I am personally very much a believer in code generation tools. Your mileage may vary.

IDEs are highly variable. Some have compilers that do a better job optimizing code. Some support dual-core debugging, and some do not. It’s quite likely that you have your favorite. I learned long ago to not argue over matters of taste or preference, like which IDE is best. I have a suspicion that in my near future I'll be writing some formal detailed collateral on how to use PSoC Creator generated code in your IDE for PSoC 6 development.I'd like to hear from you on whether you think that's a worthwhile bit of information.

What really matters is: can you choose the IDE you want? The answer to that is simple. Yes.